Wontons are the first dumplings that I learned to make. My mom entrusted me to make them for parties and other family gatherings. She fried them and served them with a Viet-style sweet and sour sauce speckled with a confetti-like bits of vegetables. It was finger food that got eaten up in a flash. That’s why our family wrapped regularly 3 or 4 packages worth of wontons for a total of roughly 200 wontons. Last Friday I made a small batch for our TGIF cocktail hour. There were leftover wrappers and I thought about how growing up, fried wontons were on my mom’s rotation of favorite foods to make. It was for good reason. In 1975 we discovered that fried wontons were a friendly food...